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There were many ideas and thoughts that went into this recipe book. Really, when you get right down to it, this has become a document of our family history. As I read the stories and anecdotes and see the photos included of not just food, but our family, I find myself reminiscing over living overseas and travelling extensively all over the world and what a wonderful childhood my parents made for my brothers and me.

While I love all aspects of the book, I think my favorite part are the appendices. One of them is dedicated solely to ingredients. I am second generation Taiwanese and I cannot read the writing, so when I go to Chinese grocery stores, I recognize ingredients, but I can’t read the labels to see if they are the correct types of ingredients (is it spicy? Does it have garlic flavoring? etc. etc.) As for my brothers, I don’t know if they ever paid attention to the ritualistic grocery shopping and the time my mom took to pore over each packaged and canned good. So, we devised a section to take care of just that. We have one appendix section dedicated solely to a photo dictionary of all of the packaged, canned and bottled goods that my mom uses in her cooking, followed by a short description of it’s use, flavor, or other pertinent information. I have already used this section extensively. Then we have a photo section for all of the various vegetables, meats, and fish found in the Chinese grocery stores and how you can prepare them. I must say I am much more well-versed in the various foods now that I was before.

The other awesome appendix is based on preparation. Have you ever wondered how to wrap that bun? How do they get all that rice into the bamboo leaves with the meat perfectly in the middle? How do you clean a whole squid? How do you cut up a chicken and re-assemble it on a plate to look whole again? Well, we have a section with a photo tutorial on all of these questions and more!

For our wonderful family masterpiece, I ended up using an online publishing company called blurb.com. I found this site through one of my graphic designer friends. While there were a couple sites to choose from, this one seemed to suit my purposes the best. Since I started this so long ago, the only option was to use the blurb proprietary software. Since it was still fairly new, there weren’t many options on customizing layouts, but since I took my sweet time, I was able to upgrade the software 3-4 times, where they built in template customization and other cool tools. Now they even have an interface with Adobe InDesign where you can import an InDesign file into their program instead of using their software, making customization literally endless. They have also improved their printing options, offering many varieties of papers to print on as well for the inside face of the book.

Our family recipe book clocked in at a whopping 310 pages. No wonder it took 10 years! While I am so relieved that this is done, I…. no… I’m just relieved that this is done! If you have any interest at all in purchasing a copy, I have included the link below, where you can preview the first 15 pages of the book. I hope you enjoy!

I have been working on a family recipe book with my mom for the past decade. Yes, you heard me, a whopping decade. This is what happens when you volunteer to document a lifetime of good eats from a very seasoned cook.

The whole thing began (a decade ago) when all of our family was home for the holidays, before marriage, kids, and other responsibilities. We were home and, as usual, my mom was busy in the kitchen, creating culinary masterpieces for us to scarf down without a thought of the time, energy, preparation, and love poured into it. I don’t remember exactly what got us to talking, but somehow we all concluded that it was a darn shame that none of us knew how to cook like my mom and that when she wasn’t around us, like when we went back to work at our respective cities, we would die of food boredom because we wouldn’t know how to do anything except make white rice from our rice cookers. This is quite a sad predicament given all the wonderful foods that you witnessed us eating on my recent trip to Taiwan. It’s like a food purgatory.

This led to the brilliant idea that we should compile a family recipe book that shows not only all the recipes my mom made as we grew up, but should also include a complete visual grocery list and a how-to photo guide on how to make some of the more complicated, traditional dishes. After much trial and error, a number of conversations with some of my graphic design friends, and some test runs of page layouts, the idea became it’s own beast. Since we all had full time jobs, the process was very slow. Also, my mom cooks a lot based on gut so she had never been tasked with actually documenting everything she made. This led to a painstaking and decade-long exercise in cooking, re-cooking, testing, photographing, and tweaking every single dish she ever made for us that we could remember and ever want to make for ourselves one day.

Let me tell you, this was no small task. Not only was there the testing, documentation, and photographing of the dishes (we did various stagings, sometimes cooking the dish up to 5 times to get it right!) Since this was a cookbook that was mainly surrounding Taiwanese food, my mom and I wanted to add some history and background about the more traditional dishes and how they related to our family. Most of the traditional dishes or the family favorites have little anecdotes or family stories associated with them. Recipes that have been adapted multiple ways have tips and tricks associated with them. It was a great learning experience for me to hear all of these great stories and tips and tricks my mom learned through trial and error.

After endless documentation, proofing courtesy of my sister-in-law, moral support from my husband, through 3 family weddings and 4 grandchildren, I’m very happy to announce that we are FINALLY finished! Above is a sneak peek of the final product! Stay tuned for my next post, which will have more details on the creation of the book, some first glance shots of some of the interior pages, and a link to purchase the book if you so choose!

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About Me

Welcome to my blog! I am a wife, mother, architect by day, and all-around dabbler in whatever catches my attention. I love baking, crafting, and anything that requires using my hands. This blog is about my journey to discovering cool and fun ways to express myself through different media. Thanks for visiting!